One Day
by PenguinsWillReignSupreme
Summary: She is cream tea on spring Sundays, rainbow sprinkles on vanilla ice cream, the icing on the cake.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I own nothing that you recognise.

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**One Day**

She is cream tea on spring Sundays in the shade of a silver lined gazebo looking out at a perfect picture of empty nothingness. She is sprinkled sugar over Victoria sponge, the cream of the milk, the silverware glinting, winking, in the low lit sun. She is the icing on the cake. She is not perfection. She makes perfection.

He watches her every day. He leans over his dusty counter, pencil in hand, lead on lip for over time he has become immune to its metallic tinge. He waits for the moment when the book in her grasp catches the eye of the dozing sun because that is the moment he needs to capture. His pencil leaves a silver mark on the ridge of his mouth – a tattooed reminder of who he is – and it meets the page that he has so wished to perfect over such a long time.

To him, this nameless woman is everything. She makes a lowly bookshop into an artist's pride and joy. He does not need to know her because he can see that she makes ia/i equal ia/i and ib/i equal ib/i and makes two plus two equal four. For him, life makes sense when he sees her. He sees gravity pulling down and snowflakes gain a shape and leaves can brown and fall and he knows they will bloom again. She is rainbow sprinkles on vanilla sundae, the wash of an ocean across undiscovered terrain. She is a memory personified, stored away in a glass case.

A glass case he cannot open.

He brushes his pencil down the parchment, his scowl a form of defence as the unwanted monotony of daily life drifts past between them. He shades and erases and smudges and waits for it to take shape. The line of her neck is not quite right – it is too slender. Too perfect. So he removes the trace and starts again, the narrow line between idealism and realism blurring too bluntly.

He tries not to glance at the clock. He knows that it will soon be time for the white-laced daydream to end, however, as the froth of milk across her lip has been shyly wiped away and she has reached out for the tasselled bookmark to mark her place in the tome grasped between her fragile hands.

She puts it down as shadow falls across her eyelids, her glasses slipping off her nose and on top of the pale purple cover of her book. He prises his hand from the grip on his escape and turns away, because he always does. The rows and rows of unbought, untouched, unwanted volumes around him close inwards, tighter, a claustrophobic chaos of curtained necessity to be read and devoured and touched.

They just need to be touched.

He lets his hand drift over the rough spines, the embossed titles, the names which he envies for they are the only ones, the single people in the world who can lay sole claim to something they have done. He will never own the subject of his work. He could never dream to. Not really.

But he will.

He waits until the bang of the door shocks him open and she comes in, as punctual as the nine o'clock train to Freedom. He looks and smiles and she responds with a quirk of her lips.

It cannot be a smile, for her eyes don't shine.

Lilies and mountains and heather and ocean, they all seem to bloom and rise around her. She is snow upon a hilltop in the biting cover of March's comfort. She is foaming waves – or waving foam? – and empurpled wishes of lingering sunrise.

"Hi."

A fairy's voice of innocent ignorance and childish whim, she has never broken the tension that only he feels before.

"Alright?"

Gruff and harsh, he wants to take it back but her ghosted smile does not permit him.

"You…don't remember me, do you?"

He looks from her pale white curls to her elegant – ringless – fingers. He jerks his head – left then right and right then left and right again and she smiles shyly.

"Didn't expect you to." Her concession cuts him: a cuckoo in the middle of a bluebird's chorus. She tucks her book beneath her arm and sticks her hand out for him to take. He hesitates – just for a second – then concedes. Milk meeting coffee, they are somewhat complete. He looks for the name, he wants it so much. A whisper cuts through his head but the words twist and melt on the tip of his tongue. Agape, he forces his hanging mouth shut with a sharp mash of teeth on shattered letters.

"Do you want to know?" She does not give him chance to interrupt because her laugh – a raven's caw – slips past him. "You draw me and I write you. I come back every Tuesday. I pretend to read and when I'm bored of yellow pages and bold font, I silently buy another from you," she pauses, "then go home and tell myself I must not go back."

"But you do."

"Can't help myself," she concedes with a shrug. "Can I see it? The drawing?"

He wants to say no but her nose wrinkles and her eyes blink slowly and he gives in. He reaches under the desk and pulls it out – dog-eared corners and coffee ringed edges – to press into her hands.

"'s good."

"Could be better," he murmurs. "Bit out of practise. Difficult when the lighting's never the same two Tuesdays running."

"I could sit for you?" she offers, not taking her eyes off her widened neck and flyaway hair. "Just once, so you could get it right."

"I'd love to."

"Don't worry, I'd pay you."

"I don't want the money."

"Then…" and she trails off because the conversation has moved so quickly that she feels somewhat out of breath. He places his hand on the half-sketched lines and stares down at the too narrow eyes and the nose that points too sharply, then up at her and their noses could almost touch and he kisses her or she kisses him but who kisses who doesn't matter because they kiss anyway and it is summer sunrises and winter hailstorms and rain on the silk of a parasol.

"You said you write me," he recalls as they draw away from each other. She smiles with teeth of snowdrops caught in moonlight and nods her head, a willow kissed by a springtime breeze.

"One day."

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_A/N: So what do you think? Potential for the ship? The story? Reviews are love _


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

She walks a little like she is in shoes made of Waterford crystal, tripping over the arch of a fading rainbow. A faint bounce in her step makes her seem unworldly in her desire to be smooth. Caution to the winds, that's the saying. Caution to the stars is what it is for her because she can climb and climb and sunlight can scald her and still the stars, burning like ashen angels, will be her goal. And with reddened hands and wicked wonder, she will capture one between pixie's fingers and carry it down with utmost, unbreakable fascination.

Because Daphne Greengrass is stubborn and what she wants, she gets and so her charcoal covered fingers lollop over the paper, smudging without much care and skipping shadows which form too closely to his shirt. She glances up, tip of her tongue grappling through tightly pressed lips, and pauses.

"What?" she asks, wiping the back of her hand against shimmering crimson lips.

Her legs swing back and forth against the kitchen cupboards, collision after collision setting the rate of their slowly synchronising hearts, a millisecond from matching beat for beat. They know each other upside down and inside out but not quite backwards, not just yet. Backwards is for two weeks time or one more kiss or one day more. There will be one day more before she can second guess his jump of shock when the phone rings before six, or he can tell by her knock that she is upset and in need of consolation. Time is at their beck and call. It stopped for them when fountain pen met sketching pad, when novelist met artist. Two struggling entertainers, unable to perform.

"I'm doing it wrong, aren't I?"

"No, no," he lies, because yes she is but he thinks he loves her and he cannot quite make the word fall over his chipped front teeth. He can deny her nothing but exclusivity, of Dean and Daphne and nothing more. The world shuts down when she is not with him, and he shuts down the world when she is.

"Don't lie," she says and he thinks he might have upset her but she smiles in silent acceptance of incomprehension and sets down his tools before she damages them further. He pushes himself off the stool, moving to just six inches, five, four, three, two. Two inches from her. Her legs push apart to wrap themselves around him and close the gap to one. One inch. Two and a half tiny centimetres. A breath. A gasp.

A kiss.

Again, a kiss because though it is not necessary, devotion shows its blossoming head with lips on lips and hands in hair and silken shirts on cotton vests. Devotion is as devotion does and devotion does its best with broken artists and failing writers; the art of subjectivity and stencilled opinions on drying parchment feeding it, draining it, an endless well of passionate whispers, kisses, subtle movements of attraction to lust to love.

"Okay, it was pretty dire," he whispers as they draw away and he trails his fingers through buttercup curls. She laughs and kisses his temple as he steps away and scoops his sketchpad to his chest and runs the charcoal through his hands. He shuffles back and back until he hits his seat and hauls himself into it. His eyes never leave her because he's fairly sure that his stomach might just explode if he dares to snatch his glance away.

Stained fingers glide over parchment. Eyes up, mind down. He doesn't even need to look at what he's doing now, her shape, every line, seeps from the tips of his fingers from memory. He does not worry that her arm could be attached to her head. It matters very little because his pencil rolls without thought and he trusts himself.

For the first time, he trusts himself to get it right.

The clock strikes four then five then six but he doesn't stop. Coffee shop romance novels a thing of the past, she sits deathly still and watches in innate astonishment. To her, a mesh of lines is to him a work of beauty and his unbroken gaze should scare her but intensity rules her life today and will do tomorrow and forever more because without Dean she is merely Daphne, and with him she feels like that means something.

A stomach's threatening growl marks the end of another day's work, that he will pore over whilst she sleeps under a threadbare blanket in his three legged armchair. She watches him as he marks down the finish time – for a reason he won't let on – then tears his gaze away for a second.

She feels empty, almost, before he spins his back on her. Black marks down white shirt, she finds the laughter spilling from her lips before she has really registered why. Sliding from the worktop as he turns quizzically to question her giggle, she holds out her soft hands for his and when they meet with their charcoal barrier, eyes on lips and not much else, there's a strange feeling of insides melting and tears forming because perfection is somewhere close.

Perfection is coming with erased lines and a scratching nib and screwed up balls of spoiled paper and that's okay. Wasted things and sights and moments are okay, because she is Daphne and he is Dean and, to be honest, perfection can't be that far away.

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**A/N: Thoughts? Love or loathe? Should it have stayed as a one-shot? Anything you can say would mean the world to me **


	3. Chapter 3

**Downpour**

She wonders sometimes whether apple pie tastes different in sunlight or whether it's just with him. Bright May skies are a growing sign of summer's railroad creeping closer and she props her spindled legs up in front of her. Daisies tickle and dandelions itch and she craves buttercups and crocuses and shattered tuneless trumpets once again but they are now a thing of the unreachable past and intangible future; paintings on the backs of eyelids half-closed in inimitable ecstasy, of once upon a time and then.

And then.

And then what?

And then him.

"Daph?"

She smiles, with sugar mice teeth and cherry drop lips, and watches him tuck his sketchbook away, his subject gone, his muse asleep for another day. He pats the ground and she swings towards him because when his muse sleeps, she lives. She lives for him and has done for so much longer than she cares to admit. Coffee shop fairytales turned into real life, his muse sleeps alone but hers is alive as long as she is with him – dusty bookshops, stale bread and a mattress on the floor, she feels her imagination running and unravelling and growing and blossoming. Some would scoff – her sister, her mother among them – but she holds her head high and presses quill to parchment, pen to paper, and knows that he has saved her, and she him.

Strong arm around pale bared shoulders, she curls against him, hand pinning her place in her book as he kisses the crown of her head. Geraniums and Busy Lizzies and tulips from Rotterdam burst into life in front of them, brilliant and bright and brushed away by passers-by but not them. Passing life by is not their job. They record the slightest thing in words and pictures and to some they are merely strokes of ink on throwaway paper but they are more, and those who have complete understanding know that because if Daphne did not write, she would not have seen Dean work, and if Dean did not draw, he would not have seen Daphne read, and so they owe their happiness to disposability and imagination and the muse that they both now know comes from the other.

"It's a beautiful day," he murmurs into pomegranate waves. She quirks her lips up and eyes rise to blueberry skies and she shakes her head beneath his lips.

"It'll rain tomorrow."

His chuckle like a seaside breeze, she winces lightly as his breath trickles down her face. He kisses the crown of her head as she tilts it to see him.

"Always the optimist."

"Always watch the weather. Sunshine and showers," and they lull into silence once again because there is little else to add besides the lingering promise of watching a London downpour fall around them.

-::-

Suns set and stars rise and they do not move a muscle. The grass has dampened, and her dress – the same shade of pale peach that she blushes when she sees him – is home to yellowing brushstrokes that she thinks of not as stains but as enhancement, merely to the detriment of the opinion of everyone else, and everyone else doesn't matter. His fingers glide over them. He calls her silly with a laugh of water rumbling over a cliff face; she shudders. He makes her feel so safe, so young – for she may only be twenty-three but she feels old beyond her years, wrinkled lines from screwed up paper beginning to mirror on her forehead – and she wants nothing more than to stay there forever.

"Hungry?" he murmurs, twisting thick fingers through strawberry curls. She leans into him. She wants to shake her head, a story of forever – undisturbed, perfectly composed forever – lurking around them. Her hand twitches. Pale pink quill between tissue paper fingers, it would dance across parchment without much more than a moment of thought. Unfolding, unravelling, enrapture itself of looping _l's_ and perfect _o's _and sharpened _v's_ and _e's_ which change from word to word, letter to letter. She wants her forever, but her stomach churns and throat is dry and although she wishes dearly otherwise, necessity to exist comes ahead of necessity to live.

"A little."

He pulls her up as though she is a doll and he a girl who believes it to be as breakable as a newborn baby. She holds herself firm, firm and straight backed encircled in arms which squeeze her and she feels she might never escape, and that's okay. More than okay, it's right.

She isn't quite sure how the picnic basket and tartan rug end up in her hands. She doesn't know how she has found herself leaning on metallic green railings, tapping tired fingers on grass-marked elbows. She doesn't really mind that he makes her lose moments of her life because if he is not there, it does not really matter.

"Classy," he mutters through a mouthful of food, wiping his lips and grinning. His eyes light up, even in orange streetlamps and fragmented moonlight and flashing headlights, once or twice. Foot propped up on a cold brick wall, she looks up to him. Fish and chips and a bottle of something Muggle between them – diet, because she doesn't insist but he knows – and plastic forks on polystyrene trays should creak and screech and yet they don't. They might, somewhere else, three months, three years, three weeks ago. Not now. Now the only noise she hates is the silence when there is no heavy breathing, no waterfall of laughter, no voice that might be the sound of love itself.

Screeching brakes and nails on a blackboard and the pop of a balloon, children crying – none of them hurt, none of them are important because sound brings things to life. It brings love to life, and they neither know nor need to speak of it because she hears heavy breathing, and he hears whispering sighs, and words cannot express it – and so they don't.

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**A/N: I really want to dedicate not just this chapter but the whole story to Marina (marinahill) at HPFF, whose ridiculous level of support for this has kept me with it. I hope I don't disappoint you.**

**Next update may be a while off as I've got horrible writer's block on this.  
**


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four: One Day**

She watches the clock strike six with a youthful fascination of striving to understand. The tick of time once ruled her life; routine and expectation, a world according to disembodied hands and a countdown of seconds left to live. Each new day marked by dreams of unfamiliar lips and whispers of promises that were never made and always broken, substance shot by structure, she lived for the hope that days would merge and dreams would fade and one day, perhaps, the hands and lips and breath on hers would define morning, noon and night and every shattered moment in between.

And then there was Dean and a kiss became a connection, the touch of a hand became a speech, love became life. Six did not mean the burial of the sun behind the chimney pot landscape of London, nor the sound of a bubbling stove and chink of a china plate on plastic worktops anymore. Six meant the turn of a key, the rustle of a bag, charcoal on a pure cotton canvas. Now, six meant home.

"Don't move."

She smiles, because she can't stop, and freezes because she can. Paper flickering like the clipped staccato of a guitar string, she urges to swing her legs back and forth but does not move a muscle. He only ever captures perfection, that's what he told her once, and if this is his perfection, she must preserve it for him in the slotted light of fourteen seconds ago.

He draws and draws, and her hand twitches around the pen clamped in her hand. He works and she plays, and she wants a role reversal, a moment where she can immortalise him in ink lines and words that speak so much louder than a thousand pictures.

"_You draw me and I write you."_

She smiles again and taps the pen on the worktop with impatience that she feels tingling at the tips of her imagination. The nib presses against the textured desk and skids. She moves. Perfection lost and the scraping stops and she holds her breath and lets it out when kisses formed from lips stained with grey trace across her neck. She turns, because she always does, and brushes her hand across his cheek and in the clash of everything so opposite, so different, she feels for one moment that art, that words, that pencils and pens are nothing. At least, they are nothing in comparison. They are nothing compared to this.

"Let's go away," he murmurs and his voice sounds like an affirmation of everything she has hoped for before today, before that moment. She laughs, because he is being ridiculous and enticing and speaks with an artist's spontaneity. A flash of a moment, of a cityscape, a cliff top on a Tuesday morning as sunrise becomes day, they all come and go and so does he. "Barcelona, Marrakesh, Sydney," he adds and his words are like a kiss and a liberation and _everything_. She moves from beneath him, twisting and turning and darting away and he smiles, because that's what they do.

"And New York and Rio and Bangkok?" she says and he cannot say anything but yes. Always, always yes because she is what makes yes irrefutable and questions statements and life melts into love and trust and the future becomes the present with her. She laughs and pulls herself onto the counter and watches him watch her and it is the most natural thing she has ever experienced. With every step he makes towards her, every touch and every sound, he makes her heart stop and her breath catch and if it killed her, it wouldn't matter because dying of love, that wouldn't be so bad.

"Remember when we met?" and it is the stupidest question because she could never forget and so she nods and feels the blush that gives her away glowing on her cheeks. "You said you write me."

Weeks and months of silence, of a living, breathing, tangible muse, of kisses under, over, through bed sheets and glances over empty rooms not crowded streets and window panes and coffee rings on books. Weeks and months and never the repetition of the question that has haunted her so long, the question that she has both yearned to be asked and wanted to ignore, the answer that will give her wholly to him.

"Show me."

A command. A direction from the sky above. She cannot say no. She never could, not around him where the past and present are so beautifully exclusive, where the whisperings of a Muggleborn wizard and a pureblood witch that would once have lost her everything now became proof of love above all. Love above blood, above the stars, above everything and everyone, every double take and murmur. Love winning out as it will forever.

She cradles her pale purple bound book in her hands with the care a mother gives to a newborn child. Caution that he has never seen in her before now grips her like addiction in the face of weakness. A childish reluctance, hesitancy binds her to the spot and with shaking hands and a look that searches far behind him, far beyond the realms of what he has known before, she holds it out.

Against hers, his hands look monstrous.

Beside her, he feels her heart race.

Beside him, she knows that this is it. The moment that secures them together. Not a ring, nor a vow, nor a kiss but a book; words and pictures colliding and merging and matching. Completing. Silence has never felt so sharp, a knife edge grazing against her throat. Time slips by and by, a lazy crawl and in his presence, she has never felt so uncomfortable. She shivers.

He stops. Fingers caressing the border, silver glinting edges as she once was to him. The skylight shines golden upon her and now he knows it's different. Hours, days, weeks have passed and the question has laid on his mind. One day. One day. One day he will know, she will tell him, but in the soft light of dusk, he knows that one day does not mean weeks. One day means months and years and decades and without an ounce of reluctance, he holds it back to her.

"I thought you wanted to read it?"

He smiles and so does she because she knows. She knows that now the hours have become days and days weeks, that weeks will surely become life because without him, she will feel none of this again. She will never again be at home in blissful escape from everything that is not him. She will never be able to bury herself completely in everything she loves without an ounce of guilt. She will never feel like she is made of the finest crystal when he lifts her from the ground and presses his lips to hers so gently that she, for one fraction of a second, believes she would break under the touch of another.

She knows that this is what perfection is and when he kisses her this time, and the world spins in reverse, she knows she wants nothing else but him. He pulls away, and his hands become hers and normality settles back around them with the simplest of smiles and the simplest of words.

"One day."

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**A/N: And that is the end. I wish I could have made this the 6-7 chapters that I'd hoped for but sadly, I seem to have lost the ability to write this story (I knew I should have written more when I did the last two chapters!) **

**I hope this chapter wasn't too disappointing. I know it's nothing compared to the previous three but I hated seeing it going without an update, and knew I wouldn't be capable of making it longer so thought I'd put myself out of my misery. I may yet add another chapter if the moment strikes me, but I can't make any promises.**

**I hope you've enjoyed and I must say a huge thank you to Marina (marinahill) at HPFF because without her, this wouldn't even have got this far **


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